Is Your Pastor Preaching Sermons Against Illegitimate State Power?
I begin with a video by Mark Steyn, who is an articulate and wise observer of the present social order.
I am on the side of the pastor in Vancouver, British Columbia, who ordered the police to leave unless they had a warrant.
How wonderful that cell phones and YouTube exist to display acts of resistance.
IF I WERE A PASTOR
I decided in week two of seminary that I did not want to become a pastor. The president of the seminary gave a lecture on what it takes to be a pastor, and he persuaded me. I left at the end of the academic year. That was one of my better decisions.
Yet the lockdowns would have been ideal for my kind of preaching. Sermons should be grounded in theology, but they should also be relevant to the vital issues of the day. Church members must make decisions in a specific historical context. The historical context today is being set by government lockdowns all over the world.
We have not had a civilization-wide common context to match this one since 1348-50: the bubonic plague. All of Western civilization was hit. It wiped out at least one third of the population of Western Europe. That was when we got quarantines. Sailors in Italian ports could not legally come ashore. The procedure did not work. The fleas on rats onboard the ships carried the disease. When the rats reached land, they spread the plague. There was very little person-to-person spreading of the disease. The pneumonic plague did exist, but epidemiologists think it was a minor factor. (No one can explain the two forms of plague working in tandem.)
The plague undermined the authority of the church. Some priests fled the cities, which were hit hard. More important, nothing seemed to prevent the spread of the disease: not prayers, not holy water, not rooms filled with burning candles, not anything except total isolation on large estates. The religious establishment never fully recovered. Its legitimacy had been called into question by the plague and by the social disorder that engulfed the culture.
The Renaissance began in the aftermath of the plague. Boccaccio's Decameron is literary evidence of this. It is a series of short stories, some pornographic, that is set during the plague. The old moral framework was undermined. People's confidence was profoundly shaken.
Today, the lockdowns are once again undermining the authority of churches. Pastors are cooperating with the governors' decrees. Most church members agree with the pastors, although there are signs that a growing number of citizens have had enough.
Churches should have the right to set safety standards inside their buildings. But they should not be compelled to enforce state administrative standards. Setting such standards has set a precedent. It is clear that some governors and some national politicians enjoy their power to do this.
The lockdowns are officially justified in the name of science. But scientists are not agreed on much of anything regarding the disease: the severity of the COVID-19 threat (pandemic vs. bad flu), the best procedures to keep from catching it (face masks vs. vitamin D and zinc), the best treatments after someone gets it (ventilators vs. hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin), and the effectiveness of social distancing.
If sermons today are devoid of content regarding the lockdowns as an assault on religious liberty, then pastors are ignoring an historic opportunity to raise issues that have been central to Christian worship ever since the days of Nero. The issue of church/state relations is always a live issue theologically. But, in the United States, theologically conservative pastors have generally avoided this issue ever since the end of the Civil War.
Liberals preach on the necessity of the welfare state in the name of the social gospel, which in fact is mostly a political gospel. But they find it difficult to find anything in the Bible to justify the welfare state. This passage definitely prohibits wealth redistribution by the state.
Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour (Leviticus 19:15).
I have written two chapters on this law in my commentary on Leviticus.
Social gospel preachers never comment on this law, for obvious reasons. I have devoted a department to refuting the social gospel: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department61.cfm.
In contrast, most non-liberal pastors and priests remain silent on matters of social order and politics. It is safer to avoid such issues, since church members disagree. Pastors do not want to cause church splits by bringing up such issues. This is a theological mistake. There is a strong biblical case for social action, as distinguished from political action. A group of evangelical scholars and activists made this case in a symposium that I edited in 1981. Download it here.
Pastors should draw theological lines in the sand against the physical invasion of church property by armed agents of the state. The Bible teaches the right of lawful resistance to state tyranny. I edited two books on this in 1983. Click the links to download them.
Theology of Christian Resistance
Tactics of Christian Resistance
There is an old phrase that is worth considering in today's context. "He is so heavenly minded that he does no earthly good." There are such Christians. They are content to allow non-Christians to shape history. They prefer this absence of responsibility. But this has not always been the case. C. S. Lewis observed:
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth and you will get neither.
As the disease recedes, the worst features of the lockdowns will be abandoned by governors. These rules were not voted on by legislatures. They are the products of over-reaching governors and bureaucrats. They are now matters of administrative law. No federal law passed by Congress authorizes the Centers for Disease Control to make it illegal for landlords to collect rent. Therefore, no agency should enforce this decree. But there is no widespread resistance by governors and sheriffs to its enforcement.
The lockdowns are now legal precedent all over the world. The pastors did not fight this, week by week, sermon by sermon.
The sheep are in government pens, ready to be sheared. The fact that the doors will be opened does not matter much. The pens are going to remain.
If I were in a pulpit, I would be preaching against this. This is a unique opportunity to call the messianic state into question.
CONCLUSION
Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's first chief of staff, became famous for this remark in the midst of the recession: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."
I would modify this as follows. "You never want the government's overreaction to an alleged crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to challenge things that you think you could not have challenged before."
The time is now. The modern state does not invoke the churches for support. It invokes tax-funded science. The modern state claims to have authority over society. It rests its legitimacy on this claim. But this claim is looking less plausible than it has for over a century. The competing humanistic voices of authority are producing cacophony, not a symphony. They are tearing apart the social order. The political order will follow.
The Left has overreached. The public is beginning to perceive this.
We need pastors who are willing to present the theological foundations for a time in which the nation-state runs out of money and can no longer pursue its messianic agenda.
Who will pick up the pieces? Those people and groups that take responsibility locally for problems that the state has either caused or is incapable of solving. This is a long list. It will grow longer.